2010-01-29

Pablo Parrilo, the Finmeccanica Career Development Professor at MIT’s Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems, has developed a new set of techniques that make it easier to get a handle on nonlinear systems. Moreover, in many cases, his techniques provide algorithms — step-by-step instructions — for analyzing those systems, taking away much of the guesswork. “The impact he’s had has been huge. Huge,” says Russ Tedrake, a robotics researcher at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab. Tedrake has adapted Parrilo’s techniques to create novel control systems for walking and flying robots, and major engineering companies have used them in the design of aircraft and engines. Quantum information theorists have used them to describe the mysterious property known as entanglement — in which the states of subatomic particles become dependent on each other — and biologists have used them to make sense of the complicated chemical signaling pathways found in cells.

2010-01-25

The Argonne National Laboratory scientists said the algorithm, known as the neutron transport code, enables researchers for the first time to obtain a highly detailed description of a nuclear reactor core.

"The code could prove crucial in the development of nuclear reactors that are safe, affordable and environmentally friendly," laboratory officials said in a statement.

2010-01-22

"A big frontier for the field of nanoscience is in finding ways to make what we can do on the nanoscale impact our everyday activities," Hauge said. "For the use of carbon nanotubes in devices that can change the way we do things, a straightforward and scalable way of patterning aligned carbon nanotubes over any surface and in any pattern is a major advance."

2010-01-19

A collaborative research project has brought the world a step closer to producing a new material on which future nanotechnology could be based. Researchers across Europe, including the UK's National Physical Laboratory (NPL), have demonstrated how an incredible material, graphene, could hold the key to the future of high-speed electronics, such as micro-chips and touchscreen technology.

2010-01-18

In a 2009 article in Nature Nanotechnology, Dr. Seeman shared the results of experiments performed by his lab, along with collaborators at Nanjing University in China, in which scientists built a two-armed nanorobotic device with the ability to place specific atoms and molecules where scientists want them. The device was approximately 150 x 50 x 8 nanometers in size — over a million could fit in a single red blood cell. Using robust error-correction mechanisms, the device can place DNA molecules with 100% accuracy. Earlier trials had yielded only 60-80% accuracy.

2010-01-13

Scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology and Indiana University have determined the most accurate values ever for a fundamental property of the element lithium using a novel approach that may permit scientists to do the same for other atoms in the periodic table.

Two hundred years ago, archaeologists used the Rosetta Stone to understand the ancient Egyptian scrolls. Now, a team of Carnegie Mellon University scientists has discovered the beginnings of a neural Rosetta Stone. By combining brain imaging and machine learning techniques, neuroscientists Marcel Just and Vladimir Cherkassky and computer scientists Tom Mitchell and Sandesh Aryal determined how the brain arranges noun representations. Understanding how the brain codes nouns is important for treating psychiatric and neurological illnesses.

2010-01-07

One of the main applications of this research that Cha and her group are interested in is for sensing. "There is no foreseeable route to be able to build a complex array of different nanoscale sensing elements currently," said Cha, a former IBM research scientist who joined the UCSD Jacobs School of Engineering faculty in 2008. "Our work is one of the first clear examples of how you can merge top down lithography with bottom up self assembly to build such an array. That means that you have a substrate that is patterned by conventional lithography, and then you need to take that pattern and merge it with something that can direct the assembly of even smaller objects, such as those having dimensions between 2 and 20 nanometers. You need an intermediate template, which is the DNA origami, which has the ability to bind to something else much smaller and direct their assembly into the desired configuration. This means we can potentially build transistors from carbon nanotubes and also possibly use nanostructures to detect certain proteins in solutions. Scientists have been talking about patterning different sets of proteins on a substrate and now we have the ability to do that."

"With these findings, it now should be possible to predict gross features of RNA 3-D shapes based only on their secondary structure, which is far easier to determine than is 3-D structure," Al-Hashimi said. "This will make it possible to gain insights into the 3-D shapes of RNA structures that are too large or complicated to be visualized by experimental techniques such as X-ray crystallography and NMR spectroscopy. The anatomical rules also provide a blueprint for rationally manipulating the structure and thus the activity of RNA, using small molecules in drug design efforts and also for engineering RNA sensors that change structure in user-prescribed ways."

Researchers from the Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin für Materialien und Energie (HZB, Germany), in cooperation with colleagues from Oxford and Bristol Universities, as well as the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, UK, have for the first time observed a nanoscale symmetry hidden in solid state matter. They have measured the signatures of a symmetry showing the same attributes as the golden ratio famous from art and architecture.

2010-01-06

At 2008’s International Electron Device Meeting, researchers at MIT’s Microsystems Technology Laboratories demonstrated silicon nanowires with twice the electron mobility — which indicates how easily current can be induced — of their predecessors. Now, the same group has shown that they can build chips in which up to five high-performance nanowires are stacked on top of each other. That would allow nanowire transistors to pass up to five times as much current without taking up any more area on the surface on the chip, a crucial step toward establishing the viability of silicon-nanowire transistors.

Scientists in Texas are reporting the development of a "nanodragster" that may speed the course toward development of a new generation of futuristic molecular machines. The vehicle -- only 1/50,000th the width of a human hair — resembles a hot-rod in shape and can outperform previous nano-sized vehicles. Their report is in ACS' Organic Letters, a bi-weekly journal.